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Anyone surprised that games are way more popular on the iPhone than on competing plaforms? Mplayit has put out some interesting stats, not only on what apps are popular with their Facebook sharing users, but what kinds of apps are popular on the various platforms they monitor. While on Android and BlackBerry, non-game apps account for 83% and 67% of popular titles, on the iPhone they're only 36%. That leaves 64% for games.

That might be a concern, frankly, if the numbers weren't north of 150,000 leaving plenty of room for great productivity, utility, social networking, and other apps in addition to the increasingly good games. Embarrassment of riches indeed.

Vlingo 2.0 for iPhone [Free with in-app purchase - iTunes link] brings an all new, all prettier graphical user interface to the table, as well as Email and SMS Paste dictation -- as an in-app purchase.

The new UI looks great and more importantly, works great. The icons are big and easy to hit and helpful tips are littered everywhere. You can tap to start recording and tap again to stop, or just hold down, talk, and release. For the various situations where you need to use voice instead of typing -- like while driving (if it's legal in your region!) -- that kind of ease of use is priceless.

With the free app you get Maps, Search, Social (Facebook and Twitter), and Voice Dial. As mentioned, the Email and SMS Paste dictation are via in-app purchase. Note, it's called SMS Paste because, unlike with Email, Apple won't allow apps to send SMS so it just copies your text and launches the Messages apps. You have to paste the text and then hit send on your own. The Email and SMS Paste options are $6.99 separately or $9.99 if purchased together. Whether they're worth or not depends entirely on how important voice email and SMS dictation are to you right now.

TiPb got our hands on the final version a couple of days early so we had a chance to try it out for a while already. All in all, Vlingo 2 works about as well as you'd expect a voice dictation app to work -- usually quite well, with hilarious tragedy on occasion. It does learn, however, so if you enunciate well and keep at it, your results should improve.

I liked it enough to buy the App Store version on release along with the Email and SMS Paste bundle. It's bleeding edge technology that should get better and more elegant in the future. And I'm a sucker for the the Star Trek-style apps.

Screen shots and video after the break! If you try it out, let us know what you think!

While Apple vs. HTC is getting a ton of press this week (TiPb a culpa!) the New York Times blogs provides the above graph to show us it's just another strand in the growing web of mobile patent pugilism.

Although patent litigation is not new in the technology world, these suits, specifically around mobile, point to the drastically changing mobile landscape. Lawyers I spoke with explained that mobile technology was still in its infancy and these large computing companies were trying to stake their claim to the future of computing.

AT&T CEO, Randall Stephenson, has been quoted in saying that the Apple iPad will be a "Wi-Fi driven product" so no customers should be concerned with poor 3G data. But it did not end there, he also went on to say the following.

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blockquote>"My expectation is that there's not going to be a lot of people out there looking for another subscription."

Rupert Murdoch is bringing a Wall Street Journal app to the iPad the media mogul confirmed in his own paper:

"In fact, we've been allowed to work on one, and it's under padlock and key. The key is turned by Apple every night. But we will be on that with The Wall Street Journal."

Condé Nast is also getting in on the action according to the New York Times:

GQ will have a tablet version of its April issue ready. Vanity Fair and Wired will follow with their June issues, and The New Yorker and Glamour will have issues in the summer (the company has not yet determined the exact timing for those).

They say GQ for iPhone has already sold 150,000 copies, and they'll experiment with various advertising and pricing models. All the magazine apps will be developed internally with the exception of Wired, which was/is developed with Adobe.

Publisher Penguin wants to go so far as to abandon the limitations of the ePub format and make their books into apps, says Paid Content:

“We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about.

Billboard is reporting that Amazon MP3's deals with record labels to offer certain albums a day early and a few bucks cheaper have caused iTunes to raise a few eyebrows... and flex some not-so-subtle music muscle.

In exchange for a Daily Deal promotion on a new album, Amazon has been asking labels to provide it with a one-day exclusive before street date and such digital marketing support as a banner ad on an artist's MySpace page and messages on label and artist Web sites and social network feeds.

9to5mac.com has just posted a interesting little iPad tidbit -- it seems as if Apple's latest creation has the ability to make emergency calls.

The image above is a screen shot taken from within the iPad SDK emulator. To get to the emergency call screen the developer simply enabled the passcode lock and entered in the wrong password five times.

According to the Wall Street Journal, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson took the opportunity, while speaking at an investor conference, to once again talk about the iPhone remaining on his network, and also touch on the iPad, problems in New York and San Francisco, variable pricing, and Apple's new darling, the iPad.